The theoretical behavior of a wormhole, i.e. a tunnel in space-time, was explored: it was not physically created, but its dynamics were studied thanks to a quantum computer which simulated two black holes and then sent a message between them through a 'shortcut' in space-time.
This is the first experiment of its kind designed to explore the possibility of quantum gravity, a theory that unifies gravity and quantum physics, two fundamental and well-studied descriptions of nature that seem inherently incompatible with each other.
The study is published in Nature by Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Mit), California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Google Quantum AI and Fermilab.
Wormholes are bridges between two remote regions in space-time.
They have never been observed experimentally, but scientists have been theorizing about their existence for nearly a century.
In 1935, they were described by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen as tunnels through space-time and are therefore referred to as 'Einstein-Rosen bridges', while the term 'wormhole' was coined by physicist John Wheeler in the 1950s.
The idea that wormholes and quantum physics, especially entanglement (a phenomenon whereby two particles can remain connected over large distances), may have a connection was first proposed by Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind in 2013 In 2017 Jafferis, along with his colleagues Ping Gao and Aron Wall, extended the concept to end-to-end traversable wormholes.
The researchers demonstrated that this gravitational description of a traversable wormhole is equivalent to quantum teleportation, a phenomenon already demonstrated experimentally with the transport of information over long distances via optical fiber and over the air.
The new experiment has done nothing more than explore the equivalence of wormholes with quantum teleportation, probing the idea that information traveling from one point to another in space can be described in the language of gravity (wormholes) or in the language of quantum physics (quantum entanglement).
The experiment was conducted on a version of Google's Sycamore 2 computer, which has 72 qubits.
Of these, only nine were used to limit the amount of interference and noise in the system.
"This work represents a step towards a larger program of testing quantum gravity physics using a quantum computer," concludes Maria Spiropulu of Caltech.
